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They are also asking instead for government subsidy to allow Filipino jeepney assemblers to modernize the jeepney.
The government-dictated phase out cum modernization program would result in killing of local operators and manufacturers, joblessness for current jeepney drivers, the takeover of big corporations and consequently, higher fares, warned the protesters.
“In 1996, President Fidel Ramos said Apec will bring development, and will make us a Tiger Economy. Now, we can’t even meow like a kitten.”
“Cementing this kind of neoliberalism requires repression and we’ve seen that repeatedly.”
“The policy of globalization opens up our economy to trade and investment of big, foreign business, to be run as business and to benefit only the few, while majority are impoverished.”
Prices of goods and services have doubled or increased by 110 percent between 1997 and 2012. Meanwhile, the individual income tax brackets have remained unchanged.
The Philippine Coconut Authority’s (PCA) 2014 to 2023 road map has identified about a million hectares of potential oil palm farms. Ninety eight percent of these areas are in Mindanao.
“We OFWs are overly fleeced when we’re just striving hard so our loved ones in the Philippines will at least get a taste of imported products, and here the Customs will focus the heat on it? Meanwhile they’re ignoring the huge boxes and containers of smuggled goods, why don’t they focus their attention on that instead of the poor OFWs?”
Seven out of ten Filipinos rate themselves as poor, according to the latest survey of independent think tank Ibon Foundation.
"it does not take a genius to figure out that we have been lied to. We have been scammed and held up by corporations and our own government, all in the name of private profits and debt incurred by the government due to an onerous build-lease transfer (BLT) contract with the Metro Rail Transit Corporation's (MRTC)."
In its public launching, May 28, the newly formed Philippine Land Reform Movement (PLRM) said Aquino’s Charter change will worsen the widespread land grabbing, land-use conversion, and forced eviction of peasants and rural poor in the countryside.
Genuine land reform would result in genuinely broad-based overall economic growth, rapid poverty reduction and genuine food security.
“It has been six months since the Aquino government imposed the fare hikes, yet the public is seeing a deterioration, not improvement, in the train systems’ services.”
“The Aquino government wants to make the production of cheap labor even more systematic with the K+12.”
Based on world market trends, fuel energy available to power producers now cost more than 50-percent lower. As such, the Malampaya shutdown “clearly should not result to additional costs, and thus, (there is) no basis for any power rate hike.”
'The hikes sprang from the oil companies’ “imagination and greed,” which the Oil Deregulation Law gives them license to use.'
"It just goes to show that this administration is hell-bent on pursuing the interests of his bosses. And I'm not talking about the Filipino people, but the capitalists who run the MRTC and LRMC." – Train Riders Network (TREN)
“It is disappointing that no government agency, like DOLE, educated us on SAP [Social Amelioration Program) and its cash bonus because obviously, the millers and planters would not likely place our interest ahead of theirs.”
“While we should look for solutions if there is an impending crisis, we should guard against short term knee jerk solutions that make energy costly.” – Bayan Muna Rep. Neri Colmenares
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